February 17, 2025

Deniz meditera

Imagination at work

Carrying out Enterprise with Hackers, Terrorists and Dictators

6 min read

Kenneth DeklevaFormer Regional Clinical Officer/Psychiatrist, U.S. Embassy in Moscow

Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Clinical Officer/Psychiatrist (including 5 decades at the U.S. Embassy Moscow, Russian Federation) with the U.S. Dept. of State through 2002-2016, and is at present Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. The views expressed are totally his personal and do not stand for the formal sights of the U.S. Governing administration, the U.S. Dept. of Condition, or UT Southwestern Health-related Centre.

Feeling — The the latest ransomware assault on Colonial Pipeline and subsequent payment of a $4.4 million ransom in bitcoin to a Russian hacking group (‘Darkside’) has highlighted the role of negotiations in this kind of scenarios.  Performing so necessitates comprehension the leaders of this sort of groups and their motivations.

Analytic technologies exist making it possible for for being familiar with the leaders of country-states, criminal teams, and terrorist teams, as very well as hostage-takers, insider menace actors, and cyber criminals.  Such analytic resources can have sensible apps in small business negotiations, specially high chance/higher reward negotiations involving possible investments in emerging marketplaces and frontier economies.

When I have presented talks to senior national protection personnel, academic scholars, and business leaders with regards to a leader these as North Korea’s leader Chairman Kim Jong-un, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, or China’s President Xi Jinping, the issue that constantly comes up is, “can we do enterprise with him?  Is he a rational actor and reputable negotiation associate?”  Similar concerns come up in small business configurations involving large private investments, with regards to the leaders of rising economies such as Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Turkmenistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and others.  In these situations, investors desire to restrict their chance exposure due to geopolitical variables, uncertainty and ambiguity.  Leadership analytic methodologies can serve to mitigate risk, and thereby have their area in due diligence, reputational intelligence, and other types of company negotiations.

In emerging economies and frontier markets with greater degrees of opacity and handle less than just one leader, and a ‘system’ subservient to a offered chief, this sort of analytics issue even far more.  This is true even in international locations these as Putin’s Russia, Modi’s India, or Xi’s China.  Specific troubles implicate extractive economies, unusual earth merchandise, and offer chains therein.  Risks of provide chain disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, political/economic instability, nationalization of international assets, selective implementation of rule of regulation, cultural aspects, or absence of rule of regulation are also key variables deserving of investigation.

A further concern is no matter whether ‘soft power’ – on a national scale – can influence a leader and his/her internal circle?  The latter has considerable resonance in quite a few rising and frontier sector nations around the world, in which much larger powers these types of as The us, China, France, the United Kingdom, and Russia compete for influence, even much more so for the duration of and following the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic.

A crucial point in negotiations is that personalized relationships, rapport, and empathy make any difference.  This implies choosing the correct negotiators, persons with listening techniques, empathy, a strategic (not just tactical) watch of intelligence, endurance, and a superior tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty.  Likewise, investors in frontier marketplaces price executives who embrace uncertainty, threat, and ambiguity, and who are eager to get their boots filthy.  As the American billionaire trader Gabriel Schulze implies, “Opportunity is frequently uncovered on the edge of our ease and comfort zone.”


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Governments and legislation enforcement agencies have utilized management examination to profile leaders of terrorist groups, in conditions of establishing political tactics, crisis response, and negotiation system.  This sort of negotiations include higher degrees of ambiguity, uncertainty, and the want for empathy and understanding of terror leaders who have committed evil acts of violence.  These types of negotiations usually include 3rd party emissaries, as governments simply cannot be witnessed as the principal negotiating companion.

The latest several years have witnessed the involvement of large-level government intermediaries in negotiations involving Hamas and the release of Gideon Shalit (German intelligence officer Dr. Gerhard Conrad) and in negotiations in Nigeria involving the launch of many of the Chibok victims (Swiss intelligence officer Pascal Holliger).  The role of culture, believe in, language, and nuance continues to be important in this sort of fragile negotiations.

Negotiations in kidnap/ransom, ransomware and other unregulated markets (e.g. the recovery of stolen art) generally obey equivalent policies as in traditional negotiations.  And of program, very similar to terrorist negotiations, the stakes are substantial.  Leadership assessment of a ransomware hacker could deliver some utility for negotiators and organizations, primarily if these kinds of people are novices or relative unknowns in that area.  This can turn out to be fairly challenging, specifically when such individuals exist outside of classic cyberspace (because of to rigid operational protection), or only inhabit the Dim Website.  Criminals that are known, these kinds of as part of both a kidnap gang, or in the case of ransomware, a regarded sophisticated persistent menace (APT) actor (e.g. a country-condition this sort of as China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran, or a hacking team this kind of as Darkside in the modern Colonial Pipeline ransomware assault), may verify less complicated to profile with respect to their intentions and previous negotiating techniques.

The sheer sum of data analyzed in the higher than-mentioned settings has led to modern approaches utilizing AI and other deep discovering equipment.  Illustrations benefit from natural language processing to collect all of the relevant info about a supplied chief from substantial amounts of information and metadata this kind of instruments can make fast, timely and subtle profiles.  Other instruments contain the Good Judgment Job, which makes use of super-forecasting and crowdsourcing algorithms to improve predictions with regard to geopolitical developments this job has identified that educated, educated amateurs can frequently outperform subject make any difference specialists.  Supplemental techniques may well involve AI-dependent, psycholinguistic investigation of a leader’s social media postings and likes/comments on Twitter, Fb, and LinkedIn.  Other methods contain crowdsourcing knowledge from hundreds of professionals, analyzing their responses and making use of deep understanding algorithms to refine their conclusions.  Novel tools are also emerging these types of as voice tension evaluation and transdermal optical imaging.  The latter allows for essential indication data to be calculated from a 30-next ‘selfie’ online video, together with coronary heart fee, blood strain, respiratory amount, temperature, age, heart fee variability, and tension levels.  These applications have noticed improvement in domains in national protection and company intelligence, this kind of as evaluation of deception and authenticity verification.

Buyers and business leaders involve novel ways to measuring and mitigating risk in private fairness, enterprise cash, and in frontier markets and rising economies, where by considerable pitfalls exist together with the probable of significant reward.  In emerging economies and frontier markets, as very well as in non-standard, unregulated domains this kind of as kidnap & ransom, ransomware, and art sale/recovery, these analyses can assist personal equity traders, undertaking capitalists, organization executives, negotiators, and assumed leaders in finding that ‘sweet spot’ and maximizing their attain, whilst mitigating threat.  The private sector will proceed to have a have to have for novel methods which can seize these intangibles – the human aspect – and answers to that perennial dilemma, ‘can one do business enterprise with him or her?  Can he or she be trustworthy as a trusted negotiating partner?’

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